As new electronic communication technologies emerge and the variety of mobile devices on the market continues to expand, it has become normal to handle many daily activities through electronic interaction. Mobile devices have evolved from cellular handsets that allowed users to make voice calls to powerful do-all tools. For example, “smart phones” may comprise a variety of applications through which personal, confidential and/or proprietary data may be conveyed to communicate with family, friends or professional colleagues, perform financial transactions, etc. Newer technologies may further involve the user of close-proximity wireless communication for access control to a user's home, secure facilities, etc. The capability to perform these activities has created an attraction for people that may desire to gain unauthorized access to these devices for less-than-reputable purposes (e.g., hackers). Hackers may attempt to gain access to a device by impersonating an authorized user of the device. Once access is gained, the data in the device and any other device with which the device has-interacted, or may interact, becomes vulnerable.
Software and device designers, manufacturers, etc. have attempted to establish security measures to combat hackers. However, the ingenuity of hackers continues to evolve with new protections to thwart them. Biometric technologies, which may comprise the measurement of human characteristics or traits as a means of identification, have garnered substantial attention in recent years because security measures based on biometrics are harder to overcome. Different types of biometric sensors may provide different levels of scrutiny. For example, user identity authentication systems utilizing blood vessel mapping, retina mapping, electrocardiogram (EKG) matching, etc. may provide extremely high accuracy for authenticating user identity, but due to hardware and processing requirements, may not be feasible for implementing in smaller mobile devices (e.g., such as “wearable” devices). Moreover, it would be cumbersome to require a user to repeatedly perform these types of biometric identification to ensure that the mobile device is still in the possession of the authenticated user. Any security measures having requirements that may become burdensome to users may become useless as users would tend to avoid using them.
Although the following Detailed Description will proceed with reference being made to illustrative embodiments, many alternatives, modifications and variations thereof will be apparent to those skilled in the art.